Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

Risen sighed and drank from his glass, then leaned back in his chair with the definite indication that he had finished a wearisome account.

I waited quietly to see if he would take it up again, but he did not.

“Is that all?” I said.

“That’s all.”

“I must say that you have brought me a rare puzzle, Risen.”

“Is that all you have to say?” He gave me a sardonic sidewise glance. “You know all the characters and you have all the facts. Now let’s have the solution. Tell me who is poisoning old Coker, and how.”

I had been waiting for the challenge, and I’ll not deny there was an element of malice in my reply.

“As to the solution,” I said, “I am not prepared to claim that much. I have, however, formed a working hypothesis, based strictly on your account, which I think you should at least put to the test.”

“The devil you have! What is it?”

“As one must in mathematics, in order to proceed at all, I’ve made certain assumptions. I assume that Dr. Loos is a competent physician and that his evaluation of the situation is therefore basically correct. I assume that you are a competent policeman and reporter, and have given me a completely accurate report. I do not , however, assume that Dr. Loos’ absorption theory is necessarily valid. In my opinion, you have not exhausted the possibilities of oral ingestion.”

“I’d like to know what possibility we’ve overlooked.”

“So you shall. I suggest that Rufus Coker is swallowing minute doses of white arsenic. The doses would have to be minute, for two-tenths of one gram of white arsenic can be fatal. Such a minute dose could be carried into the mouth by a swallow of food or liquid, by any one of innumerable small and ordinary actions — provided the minute dose were already on the lips .”

“What in God’s name are you trying to say?”

“Let us clarify the matter by employing the Socratic method. Who, by your account, is the one person who shows affection for the old man? How, between the sexes, is affection traditionally demonstrated? What part of the anatomy, on the distaff side, is usually coated with a kind of perfumed and colored salve that could act both as a protective shield for the wearer and an adherent which could hold a minute dose of deadly powder until it could literally, with all the aspects of innocent affection, be rubbed off onto the corresponding part of someone else?

“If I were you, Lieutenant, I would interrupt this little demonstration the next time it occurs. In the words of the song so popular in my youth, A little kiss each morning, a little kiss each night...

We sat for a while in silence. Then Risen deliberately set his empty glass on the edge of the hearth and slowly stood up.

“Oh!” he said. “Oh, my God!”

He walked over to the door, and taking up his hat and coat he went out into the late gray afternoon.

I did not see him again until about forty-eight hours later when he returned to concede that I had been precisely right. He had two long scratches on his left cheek, but he wore them with pride as the marks of a triumphant encounter. It was the first time to his knowledge, he said, that anyone in his precarious trade had ever wiped poison from the lips of a pretty girl.

Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , December 1964.

Folk who had known Miriam Sterling for a long time were occasionally surprised to remember that she had once been a pretty girl. She may have been somewhat too thin, which had given her a deceptive look of frailty; but her flesh was nicely distributed on a frame of fine bones, and she had, besides, a kind of inner glow and intensity that made her quite appealing.

Having remembered this, these same folk were likely to realize — again with a mild feeling of surprise — that Miriam still had the basic ingredients of prettiness, and to wonder, therefore, why she was not considered a pretty woman. Her bones were still good, and her flesh was still firm, but she seemed, somehow, to have faded. Indeed, she gave a kind of spinsterish impression, but she had been married for fifteen years, and only the most perceptive understood that she was not really faded, as she seemed, but cold and hungry for want of love.

The truth was, she had married the wrong man and had been faithful for fifteen years to the wrong husband. Martin Sterling was a bully. He was not, however, a bully of the garden variety. He was abusive without ever raising his voice. He was menacing without ever making a direct threat. He was cruel without violence.

But even the most perceptive observer, noting the change in Miriam over the years, would hardly have blamed it on her husband. As a good husband, Martin took his pleasure only from his wife; but as a gentleman of some discrimination, he preferred the needle to the ax...

It was Martin himself who first remarked on the new change in Miriam. It was not actually so much a change as a reversal of the change that had been occurring for fifteen years. Somehow, for some reason, she was recovering that inner glow and intensity that had always been, for her, the difference between plainness and prettiness.

Seating himself across from her at the breakfast table, reaching with one hand for his coffee and with the other for his newspaper, Martin glanced at her indifferently, as usual, and then stopped, his hands suspended in two directions, to peer sharply.

“What’s come over you?” he said.

“Nothing at all,” she said. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

But color had risen in her cheeks, and she had difficulty for a moment in taking a slice of bread out of the toaster.

“Why, you’re almost pretty again,” he said, “which is something I haven’t been able to say truthfully for years.”

“You haven’t said it at all,” she said, “truthfully or otherwise.”

“Perhaps someone else has been saying it. Have you found a lover, my dear?”

She was about to protest hotly when she saw the sheen of malice in his eyes and the faint curve of contempt on his lips. Knowing then that he was deliberately taunting her, she merely shrugged and buttered her toast.

“You’re being absurd,” she said, hardly above a whisper.

“Well, never mind.” His voice was derisive as he completed his movements toward coffee and newspaper. “You mustn’t expect too much, my dear Miriam. It’s wise to recognize one’s limitations.”

He read his paper and drank his coffee and ate his two eggs, and then he left for his brokerage office downtown, dressed impeccably in a dark blue suit and a dark blue tie with a thin diagonal pinstripe of dark red. After he was gone, she left the breakfast things until later and went directly upstairs to her bedroom.

It was a pleasant room with a high ceiling and pale walls and eastern windows that collected the morning sun and splashed it in patterns across the floor. It was, moreover, neat and orderly — everything in its place and rarely moved; for it had been a long time since she had shared the room with another person. But in spite of the bright cheeriness, the room seemed, like Miriam, faded and cold and somehow hungry.

She went over and sat on the edge of the bed, which she had made herself just after rising. Sitting with her ankles and knees primly together and her back and head erect, she gave the impression of waiting in anticipation of some sound or movement; and she was, indeed, engaged in a small ritual that had lately given her a measure of warmth and hope and pleasure.

She was waiting for release — the silent word of an inner voice that would tell her, at the climax of her anticipation, when it was precisely the right instant to do what she had come here to do.